Saturday, October 31, 2015

We were recently advised that the document repository website Docstoc will cease to operate in December, which means that nearly 200 playlists in PDF format that we have been harboring there will soon disappear.

As podcasts get recycled and reused, I will move old playlists to the Internet Archive (as I have been using the IA as the playlist repository for several months now), but do not plan a mass migration (the task is just too much for me to handle at this time).

If listeners need a specific playlist, simply drop me a line and I will post it on the IA for sharing. My apologies for this unplanned inconvenience.

This month’s posts

We traditionally use November to undersco re departed artists and composers from this year and the past.

All of our Tuesday, Friday and ad-hoc posts, as well as OTF and YouTube Channel updates get regularly mentioned (with links) on our Fan Page. If you are a user of Facebook, simply subscribe to get notified so you never miss anything we do!

Tomorrow is Hallowe'en, and I thought we should take this opportunity to consider some musical selections that are "appropriate" for the circumstances.

The first selection in the montage, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is forever associated with either reclusive organ-playing ogres, or classic shots of Gothic castles with assorted thunderstorms. Very cliche, but also very appropriate.

Every small town has a ghost story and this one is from the small municipality of Carleton Place (Ontario), up the Ottawa River valley from my home in Ottawa..

According to local folklore ,the ghost of Ida Moore is still present in the family home - Ida passed away in 1900 from consumption just as she was about to go off to music school to become a teacher. LOcal composer Mark Bailey provides this cute musical sketch inspired by the local legend - over the many years, since the untimely death of Ida, people in the house have reported strange noises, movement of objects, radios being turned off and on and windows being opened and closed. It is said by all who have encountered Ida that she is a very friendly spirit but one that likes to play tricks on the inhabitants of the house.

The first if two piano trios from Beethoven's opus 70 is known as the Ghost, is one of his best known works in the genre (rivaled only by the Archduke Trio). The D major trio features themes found in the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 2. The All-Music Guide states that "because of its strangely scored and undeniably eerie-sounding slow movement, it was dubbed the 'Ghost' Trio. The name has stuck with the work ever since. The ghostly music may have had its roots in sketches for a Macbeth opera that Beethoven was contemplating at the time."

Two more pieces on th emontage evoke stormy weather, also a classic part of any good scary story - works by American composers Kerry Turner and Wendy Carlos.

We don't think of the movie Fantasia as being a "scary movie" but it does have its scary moments... In addition to the Bach Toccata (heard then under the orchestration of Leopold Stokowski) we also had Paul Dukas' tone poem The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the final tableau, a combination of Schubert's Ave Maria and Mussorgsky's Night at Bald Mountain, juxtaposing Heaven and the Underworld...I retained the Mussorgsky tone poem, again as orchestrated by the great Stokowski.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

This month
on OTF, I have not planned to present any opera. My next opera post will be in
November, and I promise that it will be a doozy.

Instead,
for this installment anyway, I wanted to concentrate in what I think is the
simplest, purest form of musical expression – one that involves a singer, and
an accompanist, nothing more, nothing less. Just music that’s as naked as it
comes.

Art song
puts together all the basic ingredients of a great musical experience – it
requires great music and musicians of course, but also great texts, great
lyrics. The experience is incomplete if the words don’t match the sincerity and
beauty of the music.

I hope
we’re on the same page here…

All the
performances I bring to your attention today are from the extensive chamber music
library of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. According to the
Museum’s website, Isabella Stewart Gardner filled the Museum with artists
of all kinds during her lifetime, including many notable musicians and
composers who drew inspiration from the museum’s unique atmosphere. Still
today, the Gardner Museum honors this musical legacy by welcoming
world-renowned musicians and exciting emerging artists to perform classical
masterpieces, new music, and jazz on Sunday afternoons and select Thursday
evenings. The Museum’s rich musical program is also available to listeners
across the globe through concert videos, audio recordings, and a free classical
music podcast.

In many of
my posts on my blog and other platforms, I have relied on the ISGM
Music library to illustrate some of my musical musings, as I am doing
today. I wanted to share with you four particular performances from the
library, each providing something unique.

We begin
with Dvořák’s Gypsy Songs. The cycle of seven songs is based on Czech
poetry by Adolf Heyduk about the lives of Slovakian gypsies. But Dvořák chose to
premiere and publish the songs in a German translation of the original text.
The cycle was fairly successful; in particular, the song at the heart of the
cycle—the fourth of seven—has become one of his best-known, usually translated
in English as “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” Throughout, the songs are both
lyrical and spirited, combining the flavor of gypsy music with the
sophistication of Western art song.

From Czech and German to Spanish, we next consider seven popular songs by Manuel de Falla,
a delightful and varied collection of Spanish folksongs that is quite possibly
the single most popular piece of classical Spanish vocal repertoire out there.
The songs vary, from lovelorn laments to intimate lullabies to spirited dances,
but all share an incredibly sensitive and evocative approach to the piano
accompaniment—creating a sense of place and mood, while putting the traditional
tunes front and center.

Some
composers distinguish themselves in a single genre: Hugo Wolf, for example,
whose brilliant lieder are like mini-monodramas, containing a whole world of
feeling in less than two minutes of music. Wolf's first published songs were
his Sechs Lieder für eine Frauenstimme (Six Songs for Female Voice),
collected and printed in 1888. Like those of other cycles (like his
Goethe-Lieder, for instance), these songs were not composed as a set, but were
assembled from the numerous lieder Wolf had written up to that point.
Thereafter, the composer would begin to conceive of large groups of
interrelated songs, either by the same poet or drawn from the same source.

To complete
our sampling of art songs, we will feature a tenor in Liederkreis, a set
of songs based on poetry by Heine. The poems tell the tale of a love gone
wrong. In nine songs, the singer recounts stories of lost love and painful
separation.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

This month. Vinyl’s Revenge returns
with a somewhat nostalgic look (or should I say listen) at a
“guilty pleasure” recording that has been part of my vinyl collection for
years.

An Amazon reviewer says it best:

Stokowski's
performance of The Four Seasons made me enjoy this work as no other performance
has […] If you already love this music, please listen to it as conducted by
this great artist.

Indeed, as teased in my
recent post on Leopold Stokowski, we are of course
talking about Stokowski’s “Phase 4 Stereo” recording of Vivaldi’s Four
Seasons with the “New” Philharmonia Orchestra featuring its
then-concertmaster (leader) Hugh Bean as soloist.

Why is it a guilty pleasure? I guess it's the
unashamedly "big band" sound... For the record, this recording was
displaced in my music collection by the 1982 original instrument version by
Simon Standage and the English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock.

Perhaps the finest "big band" Seasons
comes from this oft-reissued Phase 4 recording which brims with the conductor's
characteristic and highly personal tonal color, rescoring and inflection, but
it's deeply heartfelt and thoroughly delightful. Indeed, the dynamic continuo
and vivid recording even render it highly stylish.

At 45 1/2 minutes it's seductively slow, but as
our soloist Hugh Bean once said of Stokowski's generation,” they made time
vanish”.

And Bean would know a thing or two about that
generation of conductors, having served as co-leader, and later leader of the
“old” Philharmonia under the great Otto Klemperer. Hugh Bean was, by all
accounts, one of the finest British violoinists of his day, a tenured teacher
at the Royal Conservatory of Music and an accomplished chamber and orchestral
performer. Bean is also well-known for performances of great British violin
works: the Elgar Violin Concerto and Vaughan-Williams’ The
Lark Ascending, which he both recorded at around the same time as these
Vivaldi concerti.

Both of my Tuesday Blog posts this month are dedicated
to the late great conductor and arranger, Leopold Stokowski. In fact, this
week’s selection from the Podcast Vault features three
relevant aspects of Leopold – his adaptations of great works for Symphony
Orchestra, his incisive conducting and his love for the Baroque.

In recent years, advocates of early instruments
and “Historically Informed” performances may have gained the upper hand over
those who want to hear baroque music played on today's fuller-sounding
instruments. In spite of our ears being “tuned” to these tendencies, the
legendary conductor eloquently makes a case for antique music on modern
instruments. Old-fashioned gut strings? Forget it. Smaller ensembles? Quite the
opposite.

This week’s podcast, for example, provides one
of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” under Stokowski’s baton – the entire
set will be featured in an upcoming post. Truly, one cannot mistake this for
HIP, yet the colour of Vivaldi’s music and the inventiveness of his use of the
harpsichord, at times as the continuo, and at times as a soloist itself, is
something only a master interpreter would exploit.

Of course, controversy lingers over whether
Stokowski actually penned some of his transcriptions. Some have attributed the
``Bach-Stokowski'' works to Lucien Cailliet, clarinetist and
resident orchestrator in Philadelphia from 1920 to 1938. The exact truth may
never be known; but there is no doubt that the transcriptions convey
Stokowskian ideals. As a conductor, the Philadelphia Orchestra's third music
director knew the coloristic potential of an orchestra; as an organist, he
played Bach, and had a concept of sound consistent with the instrument's big
rumble.

Stokowski's orchestrations boldly declare “drama
is King”, and the bigger the emotion the better. Less evident in the Purcell pastiche
I programmed, the drama, and the “Philadelphia Sound” in all its early
stereophonic glory is in the front lines in Stokowski’s orchestration of Wagner’s
Love Music from Tristan und Isolde.

The final piece, an electric reading of Nielsen’s
“Four Temperaments” symphony (performed with the Danish Radio Symphony, no
less) explodes with colour and energy.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

We were recently advised that the document repository
website Docstoc will cease to operate in December, which means that nearly 200
playlists in PDF format that we have been harboring there will soon disappear.

As podcasts get recycled and reused, I will move old
playlists to the Internet Archive (as I have been using the IA as the playlist
repository for several months now), but do not plan a mass migration (the task
is just too much for me to handle at this time).

If listeners need a specific playlist, simply drop me a line
and I will post it on the IA for sharing. My apologies for this unplanned
inconvenience.

This month’s posts

Our posts this month don’t follow an arc per se, though
three of the posts have a common (albeit thin) thread that unites them.

All of our Tuesday, Friday and ad-hoc posts, as well as OTF and YouTube Channel updates get regularly mentioned (with links) on our Fan Page. If you are a user of Facebook, simply subscribe to get notified so you never miss anything we do!